The Top 5 Social Media Managing Tools

Tweeting, Facebooking, checking in on Foursquare, questioning on Quora, updating your LinkedIn, pinning on Pinterest, admiring your Klout score....it is exhausting. Logging in to so many disconnected social media accounts can be a daunting and inefficient. What you need is a dashboard - a place to consume your daily intake of social media in one healthy dose.

As such, here are the top 5 social media aggregation sites and dashboards, including highlights and breakdowns of what each site or app does:

1. Flipboard: Flipboard is an social online magazine with a slick interface. It functions best on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch but it is also available in beta version for Android. It is a free app which you can easily download in the iTunes store. After setting up an account, you must separately log into each of the sites that you want to connect: afterwards, Flipboard beautifully lays out all of the content with different sized images and fonts. The layout and design of the content - which looks like someone spent weeks designing - is actually auto-generated through the Flipboard interface. The app aggregates more than just status updates; you can get news, images, links, videos, and more from many networks and publishers. While you can reply to comments and update your social networks within the app itself, you can also browse other content, such as “FlipTech” which provides relevant news articles. Bottom line: the app is incredibly attractive on an iPad or iPhone and that is why it is number one on the list.

2. Glossi: Glossi is a place for a more visually appealing version of yourself, online. Glossi is dubbed a “beautiful, living magazine of you,” and for now, the site takes your information from 5 social sites. Glossi is still in beta and you must request an invitation that they’ll send out as soon a they can. Glossi is more like a profile or personal homepage as opposed to a magazine of your favorite content, like Flipboard. Each profile is complete with a headshot, a Facebook cover photo-esque background, and below that, a nicely laid out newspaper-style portrayal of your music, videos, tweets, posts, check-ins and links. The photos seem to be very high quality and the twitter feed is separately displayed along the right side bar - which stays to the right even as you scroll down to look at other content. The site also has a nice sorting feature so you can view everything or just pictures, videos, or articles. Be mindful that your profile is public: a “shuffle” button can bring your profile up in front of any other user.

Cost:Free

Sites: Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Instagram, and Tumblr with more coming soon according to their website.

3. RebelMouse: The newest platform of them all is RebelMouse. It’s so new that for now it only combines your Twitter and Facebook feeds. Your personal bulletin board - reminiscent of a pinterest board - is organized by headlines with stories falling underneath. If you want, you can even customize the content by fidgeting with the font sizes or rearranging the posts. RebelMouse has plans to be a lot more interactive and customizable as opposed to Flipboard or Glossi. You can tweak the order of the posts, add comments to your original tweets, pick and choose specific content and eventually even change some html. Definitely a more hands-on tool compared to the rest.

Here is Mashable’s RebelMouse:

Cost:Basic service is free. $3.00/month if you want to use your own URL. $3.00/week for corporate customers

Sites: For now Facebook and Twitter: though, “Instagram and Tumblr will be integrated in three to six weeks,” according to RebelMouse.

4. Hootsuite: A social media dashboard for both individuals and businesses to monitor, post and explore all of their social media activity in one place. The custom analytics can certainly provide valuable insights and improve productivity for businesses however the features are not necessary for personal use. The home dashboard can be over overwhelming (see below), however if you are truly curious how well your tweets are received or what content your readers are most interested in - Hootsuite will provide you with the best analytics.

5. Flavors.me: Flavors.me was founded later in the game, so it’s a somewhat hidden treasure. Here you can aggregate almost any content you have online already and create a unified personal website - without coding anything. You can pull your photos, updates, videos, music and more from 35 different web services, one of the most of any social media aggregators. In addition, with the premium service you can even use a customized domain name. Still, if you don’t have your own domain, the free basic service gives you personal page with access to 222 different fonts and 7 layouts. If you are looking for a personal website or blog that seamlessly showcases your web content already out there, this site is for you. However, while this site is great for creating a centralized web presence, it fails to save time in managing social media accounts because you cannot update your status or comment from this site directly to your networks.

Jen Eisenberg, a rising junior at the University of Michigan, is a product marketing intern at Grovo, an online training platform with video tutorials that helps people learn everything from Facebook Timeline to Pinterest Pins. Jen loves the NYC tech startup scene and immerses herself in it on a daily basis.

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Awesome list of tools. Another content discovery and management tool to take note of is DrumUp (www.drumup.io). It can reduce a lot of social media management time, and post content right to user's social media pages.

Nice article!... you should also check out mybucketz a new RSS/social media aggregator on the block... The application allows you to connect to Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and/or your favorite RSS feeds, bringing all of your feeds into one central location. Not only does it provide a one-stop shop for these social networks, it allows you to group friends/followings across these networks into individual "buckets”. A bucket can be anything from one person you know, to a group such as family or co-workers, or even just a description like sports. The buckets you create, your connected social network feeds, or posts based on a keyword search can be displayed, which enables you to see and act upon a real time listing of posts coming from each service.

Another new social media management tool is Meople. It lets you gather all your friends information flows in one place with ease and never lost the track. Work with Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and other network.

Another great social media managing tool is Postano. Postano allows you to bring in multiple social media feeds, Twitter hashtags, @mentions, lists, etc. and you can customize it to your personal liking or to be consistent with your brand. What's great is that Postano allows you to both monitor and to be able to embed your feed anywhere if you'd like. It's a great and valuable tool to social media strategy.